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In case you've been wondering what Timothy Truman's been up to lately:

“Got a call from Grateful Dead Productions yesterday. They've asked to paint the covers for all 4 CDs of the 2013 run of the new 'Dave's Picks' series. Needless to say, I accepted! Will be doing 5 covers altogether -- 1 each quarter plus a cover for the bonus editions. Yep, purty cool gig! This week: cover for the last issue of Jeff Lamire's Vertigo comics series, Sweet Tooth & wrapping up the script for King Conan: The Hour of the Dragon issue 2. Next week: a cover for IDW's Judge Dredd & another for a special Joe Kubert Tribute issue of Comic Book Creator magazine.”

"With the mini-Amethyst boom that’s going on right now, I’ve read something like the following a couple of times this week: 'In the 1980s, DC Comics invented Amethyst to try to tap into a girl audience.' Which manages to make the company sound both more creative and more crass than the reality I remember.

To clarify: DC didn’t invent Amethyst, Gary Cohn and Ernie Colón and I did; and no one at DC was telling writers and artists back then to come up with a way of reaching a girl audience.

But where the folks at DC -- Jenette Kahn and Paul Levitz in particular -- deserve huge credit is in the fact that they supported Amethyst even though they knew it had *very little chance* of selling well in the comics market of the time.

“Can't you hear Diana Prince whining to Hippolyta, 'Kal-El isn't just any superboy, Mother! He's the only one who truly understands me and loves me for who I am!' while Kal-El is whining something similar to the hologram of Jor-El? This better not turn into Twilight for fanboys.”

"Strip Vertigo of its haunting, Wagnerian eternal-return score by Bernard Herrmann and you've got a muddled Orphic saga that looks like a not-great Steve Ditko comic with a performance by Kim Novak that exerts all the erotic mystery and allure of a burlap bag."

“[I'm] beginning a shift from work-for-hire to books I own, instead. I hit a point with the work-for-hire stuff where I was starting to feel burned out on it. Like my tank is nearing empty on superhero comics, basically. It's been a great job, and I think I found ways to bring my voice to it, but I have a lot of other things I want to do as a writer, too, so I'm going to try that for a while instead.”

“This is probably one of the first concept drawings of Thanos I ever did, long before I started working at Marvel. Jack Kirby's Metron is clearly the more dominant influence in this character's look. Not Darkseid. Both D and T started off much smaller than they eventually became. This was one of the drawings I had in my portfolio when I was hired by Marvel. It was later inked by Rich Buckler.”

"I hope he looks at them with an open mind and a chance to understand this is a love letter to what he created, and more importantly that the strength of his work is allowing other people to grow and tell other stories which will hopefully inspire other creators along the way. In the way he was inspired by the creators when he was younger, we're hoping these ideas and these books are inspiring new people, so that we continue to grow the comics business as a whole."

“There's no more blatant sexism than sneering at a woman for playing 'dress-up' in a movie where the men around her are dressed in tights and robot costumes. The belief that superhero movies are a No Girls Allowed zone couldn't be more obvious.”